“Well, then—so am I,” said Alexander, smiling on her; and then adding, in a lower tone—“It is fate; who can resist it?”
He helped her to the most delicate morsels, from each dish. And to please him she tried to eat a little; but, in truth, joy as surely takes appetite away as grief does; and added to her joy in being at home was a strange, vague presentiment of something about to happen, something imminent and momentous. All the spiritual atmosphere around her seemed as full of this, as the air before a storm is full of electricity.
Alexander ate no more than she did. And neither spoke often or much.
At length, when they had lingered some time over the dessert, he arose and said:
“My child, are you too shy to withdraw, and are you waiting for me to dismiss you? Go, then, into the drawing-room, and presently I will come to you there, and you shall give me a cup of tea,” and so saying he opened the door, and held it open for her to pass out.
“Mr. Alexander—you are glad I am not going back to school, are you not?” she inquired, doubtfully and anxiously, as she paused in the doorway and raised her beautiful beseeching eyes to his face.
“Yes! by all my hopes of happiness, I am glad!” he suddenly exclaimed; and then he added—(“I am always glad to have my fate decided for me,”) and then again laughing lightly, he said—“There, go away, little love! I will join you presently.”
Drusilla went to the drawing-room; but she did not sit down; she walked slowly up and down the room, strangely perturbed by that presentiment, of which she could not yet know whether it was to be one of joy or great woe.
Alexander remained in the dining-room alone; not drinking wine, or smoking cigars; neither of these small vices affected him. He was simply trying to commune with himself; a difficult task to one so unused to self-examination as Mr. Lyon. He had always loved his beautiful pet, more than he had ever loved any other living creature; and always, as he supposed, in a fatherly, or elder brotherly sort of fashion. But lately this pure love had burst forth into a fierce passion. From the hour in which he had soothed her sorrow, and hushed her to rest on his bosom, and gazed on her sleeping beauty, he had longed to make that beauty his own forever. True, from the very first, he had combatted this passion. From the very moment that he found himself contemplating the beautiful girl with other feelings than became the brotherly love he professed for her, he put her from his arms, and tried to put her from his heart, and made arrangements for placing her entirely out of his sight and out of his way, in the safe refuge of her school. How and why she was rejected by the principal of that school, the reader already knows.
The very fact of rejection threw her back upon his hands, while the cause of it appealed to his manhood in her behalf.